


From Hostile Ground

by Sour_Idealist



Category: Critical Role: Wildemount Campaign (Web Series)
Genre: F/M, Illustrated, Mild Hurt/Comfort, Minor Violence, Pre-Series, Terrible Beautiful Goblin Teeth
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-02-04
Updated: 2018-02-04
Packaged: 2019-03-13 17:57:47
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,228
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13575921
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Sour_Idealist/pseuds/Sour_Idealist
Summary: Caleb's perspective on Nott shifts over time. She keeps saving his life, for one thing.





	From Hostile Ground

**Author's Note:**

> 1) Despite this being a getting-together fic set pre-show, I don't actually see Caleb and Nott as currently together (I just want them very badly to get there, without much hope of it), so call this slightly AU, I guess.  
> 2) Warnings for peril and vomit, neither too graphic.
> 
> NOW WITH ABSOLUTELY AMAZING ART by [@mainframe-art](http://mainframe-art.tumblr.com) on Tumblr, which you can reblog [here](http://mainframe-art.tumblr.com/post/170561541982) if you like (and it's beautiful, so why wouldn't you?).

“Caleb?” Nott asks, a few weeks into knowing each other.

“Hm?” He looks up from stirring the fire. It's a small and smokey thing tonight, fed on damp wood; they're between towns, just after rain. Beyond the edges of the clearing, water drips from the trees in intermittent plops, and the frogs are out in chorus. Nott's mask is set aside, and she's huddled into her cloak.

“You don't... really think of me as a child, do you?” she asks, peeking over her folded arms. Her eyes catch the firelight like a cat's. Caleb considers.

“I wouldn't say that I do, no,” he says. “You aren't one, are you?”

“No, I'm not.” She shakes her head. “Not for a goblin girl, anyway. I would've had the whole – the womanhood ritual and everything a few years ago, if I'd stayed with my warren.”

“There's a ritual?”

“Well, not much of a ritual,” she admits, “mostly everyone just hits you with sticks really.”

“Well then, at least you didn't miss much.” Caleb gives up on the fire and sits back, bundling his cloak underneath him in an attempt to ward off the damp of the ground. It would work better if his cloak were at all dry, but it isn't. “No, I don't think of you as a child. I would buy you fewer drinks if I did.”

“Good.” She lifts her head from her arms, a little, and Caleb smiles. She is very sweet, in her toothy, big-eared way. “It's just... you've been so kind to me,” she says, “and you've gotten me out of so many scrapes – you've looked after me, really. And it's not that I mind that, I mean, I kind of like it, but I – I want to be able to look after you too.” She smiles; Caleb notes absently that he's stopped flinching at the sight of her teeth. “I like this having a friend... thing. It's nice.”

“I like it too,” he says, and reaches over to squeeze her hand. “Let's try and look after each other, shall we?” Her hand alone is enough to prove her adulthood, come to think of it; she has the calluses of a woman who has fought for her life again and again, rough and black on the pads of her fingers. Caleb has a writer's callus, and cracked knuckles from a lucky punch that nearly broke his hand, and nothing else. She twines her fingers through his, her claws prickling his skin, and smiles.

Falling asleep that night, it occurs to him that they hadn't actually touched each other without purpose before. He's been alone for a long while; the last person to touch him affectionately was – a flirtatious inn girl, perhaps? And before that... he isn't sure.

After that touch becomes something they do, something Caleb treasures more than he'd like to confess. He has Frumpkin, of course, a warm and purring ever-presence, but even the cleverest and most magical cat isn't quite the same as Nott's warmth against his side in a cold shelter, or Nott's hand tucked in his when she steers him through the dark. More and more, too, he notices how immediately any touch would shatter her disguise; which is silly, since anyone that close will hardly be fooled by the mask anyway. But it's not just the calluses – she is all muscle, tight and hard as wire, stretched over the inhuman proportions of her bones. Her breasts give her away too: small, but soft when she nestles into his chest. (Of course he notices. It's something you notice, crushed up against each other. No other part of her is soft except her ears, which twitch under his hands like a cat's when he strokes one. Apparently it tickles.)

Their closest call comes in a little town in the west. Usually, when someone's caught – undeniably _caught_ – it's Nott, and she can run like skittering hell while Caleb grabs people's arms, demands explanations, and calls Frumpkin up beneath pursuers' feet. This time, Caleb is in the middle of a showy argument with a stallkeeper when behind him someone drawls, “What's that in your bag, stranger?”

“I –” Caleb begins, turning, and freezes at the touch of cold metal on his ribs. It sliced right through his robe at only the force of him turning.

“Because,” says the whip-thin woman holding a vicious dagger to his gut, “It looks like my grandmother's necklace.”

“Didn't a – a goblin steal your grandmother's necklace?” Caleb stammers, trying desperately not to look at the shadows where Nott should be hiding. “How could I –”

“Now that's a very interesting question,” the woman says. “Very interesting indeed. Because the only thing worse than a thief is a _goblin-loving traitor mongrel thief –_ augh!” Nott barrels into her, chittering furiously; his assailant staggers back and then Nott's hand is in Caleb's and she's shouting “Runrun _run_ run _run!”_ His ears are ringing; he obeys, letting Nott's tiny strength pull him along. There's shouting behind them; an arrow whistles over their heads, and Nott yelps and veers to the side. Caleb follows, follows; he's been arrested, been thrown bodily from rooms, had to leave town under cover of night, but no one has ever tried to kill him before and they are trying to kill him now, they are _trying to kill him_ –

“Here, go, go, go!” Nott gasps, dragging Caleb into a tiny gap between two buildings; his head glances against a hanging lantern and Nott cries out almost as he does. “Sorry, sorry!” she pants. “They won't see us – come on, come on, if we can just get to the woods –”

At some point near the edge of town the sounds of pursuit fall away, or Caleb can't hear it anymore over the sound of his own heartbeat; he's gulping air like a drowning man, his legs burning. Something wet is trickling down his ribs; it might be sweat, but there's red on his robes. He didn't even feel the cut; the knife was that sharp, or he was that frightened.

“Come on, come on,” Nott begs him, “come on, Caleb, just a little further, not far now, come on!”

It's further; it's far. Nott knows where she's going, knows how to run, and Caleb stumbles blindly after her, his arm aching with the force of her yanking him along, until at last she lets him slow.

“That's far enough,” Nott gasps, “that's far enough, we'll be – we'll be safe, we'll be safe enough here.”

Caleb tries to wheeze out a thanks, because he would be stunned and dead in the square without her, she just saved his life, but he can't breathe – he can't breathe, he would have died, he can't breathe – his stomach twists, and he drops retching to his knees. He can't throw up, he can't, they fought too hard for that food – none of it matters, he doesn't control so much as his fingers right now, and every muscle of his body wrenches as he vomits into the dirt.

Nott's hands are on his shoulders, pulling him back from a frankly disgusting fall; Nott's claws scrape gently on his cheeks as she pulls his hair back from his face. Slowly Caleb regains control of his own muscles, his twitching limbs; slowly he sits back, wiping at his mouth. He has a waterskin half-full at his belt; he takes a mouthful and spits it out again, which does at least something for the taste.

“There,” Nott says. “You, uh, all right now?”

“Better,” he admits. “I – thank you. Thank you. I would be dead. Let's get away from... this.” He waves his hand at the mess. “I can cover it up, here...”

“Oh, right, humans,” Nott says, joining him as he kicks at the leaves. “Not liking smells. Here, is this far enough? Here...” They're in a clearing, he dimly realizes; she leads him to the other side, to the shade of an evergreen tree, soft with layered needles. He lowers himself slowly to a place between the roots, leaning back against the roughened bark.

“Are you hurt?” she asks him.

“I...” He finds the edges of the cut; he's gotten deeper from Frumpkin, it turns out. The point must have barely traced across his skin. “Not seriously. I'll be fine in the morning.”

“Was it poisoned? You're sick –”

“No, no,” he says, rubbing again at the skin, which does not burn and is not numb. “No, it's fine, I'm just – very tired, and very frightened.” He tries to laugh. “No one's ever shot at me before.”

He meant it as a moment of levity; instead Nott's ears droop to her shoulders, her face crumpling, and she wrings her hands together. “Oh dear,” she says. Her voice shakes – her voice is always shaky, high and cracking, but it's different now. “It's my fault, isn't it? I make it more dangerous, they wouldn't have shot at you if it weren't for me –”

“Nott. Nott!” He levers himself up enough to catch her by the shoulders. “Nott, listen to me, please. She had a knife on me before she saw you; if you had not been there, she would still have killed me, or she would have gone through my bag and found everything else we stole, which I would still have stolen, most likely, and I would be taken and hanged. Not to mention that I would still be rotting in prison without your help, or that I would probably have lost my mind out here alone with only Frumpkin for company – Nott, please, please, don't ever think my life would be better without you. Please.”

“Oh.” She sniffles; her nose twitches. “Really?”

“Absolutely.” He shivers; the aftereffects of terror linger in him as potent as a drug. “Thank you for saving me just now.”

“No trouble,” Nott says, immediate and blatantly dishonest. She looks at him, covers his shaking hands with hers. “Hold on,” she says, and climbs into his lap, straddling him, pressing close. She buries her face in his shoulder; her spindly weight is enough to ground him, like shelter. He nuzzles into her hair, wrapping his arms around her waist.

Adrenaline still sings under his skin. Her hair smells – distinctive, but not disgusting, not like the way people joke about goblins. He undoubtedly smells worse, just now, and she smells like something green and wild, something that fits in with the leaf-loam around them and makes him think, irrationally, of the warm animal smell of clean horse and of the fresh bright air after the rain. He breathes her in, rubbing her back, feeling each individual bump of her spine. Her breath catches under his ear, and suddenly he is very aware that her knees are on either side of his thighs, that her breasts are brushing his chest, that he could lift his hand and very gently cup the tip of her sensitive, ticklish, monstrous ear. Her breath might catch again the same way it did just now; he could find out. His pulse, never calm, is quickening again.

“Nott,” he says. Even to him, his voice sounds strangled and strange. She lifts her head, which doesn't help; her eyes are absolutely beautiful, like amber, like honey. Her teeth peek through the leathery black of her lips, which should be frightening; he is charmed by every inch of her. “Nott, if you like, we can both pretend I didn't do what I'm about to do.”

“What –”

He kisses her.

For just a moment she is frozen, and he regrets every choice he's ever made; then her hands clench in his shirt, pulling him close. She cups his face again in her hands, her claws delicate on his cheekbones, and she kisses him back with such precise care her brow furrows up with it. When he slips his tongue between her lips, she goes perfectly still again; he pulls back and she follows him, now running her tongue eagerly along his lower lip. It's then he realizes she's trying to be careful of her teeth, and if he weren't already kissing her, he'd have to now. (What a stupid thought! But at this moment he is so fond of her he could burst: this clever, caring, darling girl, who spends each day swimming through a kind of fear he cannot even imagine. Who tries so hard, at everything, when no one even seems to want to let her try.)

“Nott,” he whispers, leaning his forehead against hers. “I am _so_ glad I met you.”

“Oh, but I ripped your shirt.” She pets disconsolately at his chest; Caleb shivers under the touch. He wonders what her claws would feel like, gentle and sharp on his chest, on his hips –

“I don't care,” Caleb says. “Someone cut it with a knife anyway.”

“Oh, you're right, that did happen.” She giggles a little; he can feel the hum of her laugh under his palms. “Caleb, I don't think I want to pretend you didn't do that.”

“Good,” he says inanely. “I must have done it right.”

“Oh, yes, you definitely did,” she says, ducking her head. She's smiling. Once her smile was frightening, because once Caleb was an idiot. She's still straddling him, her hands on his chest, his own cupping her waist.

“May I do it again?” he asks, and smiling, she doesn't answer: she just does.

 [](http://mainframe-art.tumblr.com/post/170561541982)


End file.
